I don't know if you watched this year's Emmy Awards or not. I'm
not even sure why I didnothing else on, I guess. But one thing
happened during that otherwise underwhelming event that was worth a
comment.

You may remember Sally Field. Like a lot of celebrities of my
generation (I'm six months older than she is, she's travelled the
long road from cutesy little ingenue (Gidget, The Flying Nun) to
television spokesperson for products like Depends, or in her case,
Boniva. Along the way, she's turned in some pretty impressive acting
and earned herself two Oscars, three Emmys, and a couple of Golden
Globes.

This was the night of her third Emmy, and she bravely attempted to
exploit the occasion by tearfully denouncing the current geopolitical
mess the Bush Administration has put us all in. The role for which she
won, I gather, is that of a mother, and what she tried to say was, "If
the mothers ruled the world, there would be no goddamned wars in the
first place!"

Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the show's
producers cut her off before she finished saying "god". Folks in other
countries, not blessed by the First Amendment, got to hear what she
said.

I knew what she said, however, and I've been contemplating her
words, ever since. I don't think I'd like Sally Field very much, up
close, and I know she wouldn't like me. She's the very personification
of the term "bedwetting liberal", and I'm ... not. But we'd agree
about this War on Everything and Everybody the Boot On Your Neck party
is waging with our money and our children's blood, and we'd both want
it stopped.

She's dead wrong, though, about the mothers.

The first mother who came to my mind after hearing what Sally said
was Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. More of a mother
than most, with five children and six grandchildren, and only two
heartbeats away from the Presidency, this is the most powerful female
in the history of the United States, or arguably, of the world, given
that Hatshepsut, Elizabeth Tudor, and Evita Peron had no access to
nuclear weapons.

Like flicking a light switch, Pelosi could turn off the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, and prevent another war in Iran tomorrow. If she
wanted to. She could assure the impeachments of Dick Cheney and George
Bush for their many high crimes and misdemeanors the day after that.
If she wanted to. She holds the purse strings and has the political
clout.

Yet for some reason, Pelosi refrains, andto my way of
measuring these things, anywaythat makes this her war, just as
it makes her an accessory to the despicable criminals who launched it
with a lie and continue it with brute force, police state strategems,
and open threats.

Sorry, Sally.

Hillary Clinton, the woman many people believe will surpass
Pelosi, powerwise, is also a mother, of one daughter. Smart moneyi.e.,
the pundits who failed to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the attack on the World Trade
Centersays Republicans want Hillary to inherit their war and be
discredited by it. But the truth is, every war the United States fought
in the 20th century was a war started by Democrats, and I don't think
they ever saw a war they didn't want to jump into with both (of your)
feet.

Hillary has waffled lots on the issue, but the bottom line is, she
won't call for an end to Bush's wars, either, which makes them her
wars, too.

Wrong again, Sally.

It's hard to decide on a proper order, but the next warmongering
mother on my list (certainly the one with the most kills so far) has
to be Waco Willie Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.
It's also hard to believeespecially given that this Jewish-born
mother of three daughters narrowly escaped Hitler's Czechoslovakian
minions when her parents converted to Catholicismbut she became
the highest public offical in America ever to openly endorse genocide,
when she told 60 Minutes that the deaths of half a million Iraqi
children, caused by Clinton's blocade of food and medicine, was "worth
it".

Sally, you can't know how much I hate to keep doing this to you.

I'd meant to focus on warlike American mothers, but I can't help
mentioning Margaret Thatcher in passing. Mother of twins and the first
female Prime Minister in British history, she was known as the "Iron
Lady". In 1982 she bossed the first real sit-down war her country had
fought (admittedly they'd had more than a few armed dust-ups in the
interim) since 1953, over a pile of rocks thousands of miles from
home.

Oh, Sally, what's happening here?

I can't remember whether it was Robert Ardrey or Desmond Morris
who observed that, unlike men, who've evolved complex patterns of
threat display, rules of war, and other behaviors to avoid a fight
unless it's absolutely necessary, women have none of these things.
Most of the time, they're not called upon to fight, but when they are,
because they're smaller and weaker than any likely aggressor, and
because they're the absolute last line of defense for their homes and
babies, they are natural berserkers who won't fight fair or pull their
punches.

Robert Heinlein famously said that the moral range of women is
broader than the moral range of men, that the best among them are
better than the best men, and the worst among them are worse. Women
often display the tenacity of a little cat fighting a great big dog.
They don't know or acknowledge any limit until the enemy is dead or
they are. That's commendable in everyday life. I have been careful to
marry just such a female, and we have made sure our daughter is the
same.

But there are thoseand yes, say what you will or flounce off
in a snit, I am among themwho believe that those traits disqualify
women for certain occupations in which rituals to avoid violence and
customs to limit it are everything. Police work comes immediately to
mind. I have never seen a policewoman I thought was fit for the job,
and I came close to being shot by one, once, over the height of my
lawn.

On the other hand, it's fair to ask, is there any man who's fit
for telling other people what to do with their lives, liberty and
property, for beating them up and killing them, or threatening to do
so?

But, as usual, I have digressed. The real questionas raised by
Sally Field last Emmy nightis, are women any better fit to lead
this sad world than men have proven to be? The answer is, absolutely
not. One of my correspondents observed that, if women ran the world,
it would have been reduced to thermonuclear vapor a long, long time
ago.

Think about Hillary Clinton and then dare to disagree.

Political women don't have to be world leaders to prove that they
can be at least as evil as men in politics are. I started this essay
when I heard about Oregon state senator Ginny Burdick, who has decided
to push a law there to disarm gun-toting public school teachers who
are worried about their ex-husbands showing up to violate restraining
orders.

What kind of low, slimy, crawling gutterscum do you have to be to
conceive a law like that, which so clearly identifies you as somebody
who would rather see a woman raped in an alley (or a school hallway)
and strangled with her own pantyhose, than see her with a gun in her
hand?

The same kind of low, slimy, crawling gutterscum as Congresswom
Carolyn McCarthy, who transmuted the racist murder of an ex-husband on
the Long Island Railway into a political bonanza and now wants to
bring back the sunsetted Clinton-Dole Ugly Gun and Adequate Magazine
Ban.

The same kind of low, slimy, crawling gutterscum as Sarah Brady,
the tragic and stupid crippling of whose husband by a crazed young
Presidential assassin, turned out to be a political and financial
windfall.

California Senator Diane Feinstein is a mother who should be added
to the low, slimy, crawling gutterscum list, as is Colorado
Congresswoman Diana DeGette. Both of these creatures are perfectly
happy to strip their fellow females of their right and means to
self-defense, while they themselves are surrounded by heavily-armed
thugs.

What does any of this have to do with warmongering?

Two things: these toxic females are waging an anti-constitutional,
illegal war against their fellow Americans, especially women. And they
are bringing each of us, step-by-step, closer every day to a civil
war.

I'd say that qualifies them.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has
been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics
of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The
American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach,
Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches,
Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website
"The Webley Page" at
lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel
Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a
literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the
epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo"
May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The
Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was
published by BigHead Press
www.bigheadpress.com
has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at
www.Amazon.com,
or at BillOfRightsPress.com.